But of far more use and pleasure to her than these now somewhat mouldy
classics were the more modern books of her cousin Charles,--that pride
and hope of his father's heart, who had died the year before she came to
Eriecreek. He was named after her own father, and it was as if her Uncle
Jack found both his son and his brother in her again. When her taste for
reading began to show itself in force, the old man one day unlocked a
certain bookcase in a little upper room, and gave her the key, saying,
with a broken pride and that queer Virginian pomp which still clung to
him, "This was my son's, who would one day have been a great writer; now
it is yours." After that the doctor would pick up the books out of this
collection which Kitty was reading and had left lying about the rooms,
and look into them a little way. Sometimes he fell asleep over them;
sometimes when he opened on a page pencilled with marginal notes, he
would put the volume gently down and go very quickly out of the room.

"Kitty, I reckon you'd better not leave poor Charley's books around
where Uncle Jack can get at them," one of the girls, Virginia or Rachel,
would say; "I don't believe he cares much for those writers, and the
sight of the books just tries him." So Kitty kept the books, and herself
for the most part with them, in the upper chamber which had been Charles
Ellison's room, and where, amongst the witnesses of the dead boy's
ambitious dreams, she grew dreamer herself and seemed to inherit with
his earthly place his own fine and gentle spirit.

The doctor, as his daughter suggested, did not care much for the modern
authors in whom his son had delighted. Like many another simple and
pure-hearted man, he thought that since Pope there had been no great
poet but Byron, and he could make nothing out of Tennyson and Browning,
or the other contemporary English poets. Amongst the Americans he had a
great respect for Whittier, but he preferred Lowell to the rest because